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Monday, 25 April 2016

Escape room boxes

Two stained wooden chests

One of the first things I've decided to think about for my escape room induction is the boxes! Which (lockable) boxes I use to put clues / materials into will influence the clues I use. So I want to decide early on what boxes I'll go for...
For the Lagadothon I used some very cheap toolboxes in various sizes, which allowed me to fit one box inside another. I quite liked this as a test of the idea as it made it fairly portable, but the smaller one didn't really fit a padlock on properly and they didn't look particularly good!
So I've bought a couple of other types of boxes to mess about with and try to see how they would work. The picture above is of the nicer looking ones! These are cheap pine boxes that I've varnished - I then added a hasp to each of them so I could use a padlock to lock each of them.
I think they look quite effective, but I'm slightly worried about the size of them! They are just right for putting A4 sheets of paper (and other stuff) inside, but I'm not sure how practical these sort of boxes will be if I need to lead students to solve 4 or 5 clues during the escape room induction...
So I'm still looking for other options, one of which might be similar to the box below!

Box from the Legend of Neb-Senu containing various compartments

I saw this at the recent Counterplay conference and thought it was a brilliant idea - designed to be a self contained set of puzzles to be used in schools, they created this box containing a series of compartments. If I can get someone to build something similar for a price I can afford, this might be what I go with!
I'll then make sure each of my puzzles fits nicely into the compartments...

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About Me

I'm a Teaching Fellow and Librarian at the University of Huddersfield. Currently interested in Information Literacy; teaching information skills; using mobile 'phones in the library; game based learning, and play / playfulness in adult education.